Macbook Air 2010 review
Macbook Air 2010 review from real life experience & how it affects the way you use a laptop.
2 November 2010
Last week I took delivery of my Macbook Air. To get to the specs first, the Macbook air is insanely light, thin, ridged. About the thickness of your little finger (at the laptop's thickest), just over 1kg in weight and ridged? No creaks or 'give' in use whatsoever. I bought the 13" model with 256Gb solid drive and 4Gb RAM and the upgraded 2.1GHz processor.
I watched Steve Jobs live from a hotel room in Hong Kong as he presented the Air to the world. I like many others placed the order for my new laptop within minutes of the shop coming back up (Apple's custom is to close the store whilst Steve speaks!). Don't think that this was an 'impulse' purchase; I had been hoping for a new Air for some considerable time to replace my 15" macbook pro that is showing signs of age.
It took a few days to arrive, but the wait was worth it. As a piece of engineering, the Air is absolutely sublime. It manages to be substantial without weight and feels completely solid, cool running and of course, silent (unless a 3D app is running).
There has been a lot of criticism online against the Air for a number of reasons. Much of this seems to be levelled at the spec for price, or 'bang for buck'. I bought the top model as I have recently upgraded to CS5, and I spend a lot of time working in Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign etc, and these are power hungry programs. The spec of the laptop roughly matches my old macbook pro, but there is absolutely no comparison in speed between the two machines. The Air has an 'alertness' that is a little unnerving. Common sense would have said that the Macbook Pro i5/7 would have been a better choice, but it definitely wouldn't have been. The compromise on portability for my travelling schedule would have made the speed boost completely unnecessary and costly. My feeling is that the source of the Air's speed is the remarkable hard-drive replacement in the Flash SD.
Programs load really really fast, and data retrieval is instantaneous. My 'main' computer is a rather big Mac Pro, and there is no question that the Macbook Air is actually faster at loading /moving between programs than the desktop, even though it has much more powerful CPU.
The choice of CPU in the Air is interesting. Apple went with the Intel Core2 processor rather than the more popular and newer i3. I can only imagine that a view was taken over what was needed, and how the machine actually felt to use, and the Core2 is a better choice. People who read specs find this choice horrific. I actually use the machine, and have no complaints.
More on 'bang for buck'. What you are buying in the Air is a piece of excellent engineering that is beautiful and functional, that is very well developed. Yes, I know that I could buy a laptop with a similar spec for half the price, but the other half is buying the bit that you actually carry around and use. And, think about it. You use a computer pretty much every day. Why not pay a bit more to use something that doesn't need lugging around and is actually a joy to use? Let's face it, the spec doesn't really matter for ordinary people these days. There will always be those who want the fastest, but the Macbook Air gets the job done, very quickly indeed. The bit you are buying is the experience.
Negatives.
I have lived with it for a short while now, and I find that the sheer thinness of the machine seems to have been a little too high on the priority list! How so? There has been a minute amount of travel on the keyboard that has been taken away that changes the feel of the keyboard. This may have saved a whole 2mm? I wouldn't mind a bigger machine that had a better keyboard feel. Secondly, the front edge is quite literally the 'sharp end'. When on a lap, this can be a little uncomfortable against one's wrists. A bit more of a bevel may change the look, but it would certainly feel better.
Screen. The Screen is HD. While this is not a negative as such, a lot of normal things appear really really small. Here's a tip to get round this, holding CTRL with a two finger swipe up and down zooms the screen.
Is it cheating? I have just noticed that the instant awake state when opening the screen is actually sometimes just a still image that has no mouse cursor on it. It takes a few seconds sometimes for the laptop to become fully ready for use. It's still damn fast though!
How the Air changes you
I agree with Steve. The Air is the first of a new generation. The Air is always 'ready'. Unlike the older computers, you open the lid on the Air, and the screen is on and the laptop ready. It's like an iPhone, and a real achievement. This makes it more like an iPad in appeal except that you can do useful things with it. Also, the sheer lightness makes it no problem to take pretty well anywhere, and the battery life means that you aren't having to lumber supporting equipment around.
I think it would be a big leap to make a Macbook Air your main computer. For this, you would have to have a big screen and plug in hard drive, not least to back it up, but also to keep media and backups off the small internal SD.
Verdict
The only thing that prevents this computer getting a 10/10 is the shape that is uncompromising to style, rather than ergonomics.... 9/10.